Memórias fictícias

Fictitious memories do not only afflict those who have been traumatized; people with stable backgrounds also struggle to distinguish between experiences that they had themselves and those they absorbed through someone else’s stories. Studies show that people will come to believe that they were in an accident at a family wedding, were attacked by an animal, or had tea with Prince Charles, if they are told that family members saw it happen. The more often the stories are told, the more likely the memories are to be implanted. A 2015 study in Psychological Science found that seventy per cent of people, when subjected to highly suggestive and repetitive interviews, would come to believe that they had committed a crime. They developed what the authors called “rich false memories,” detailed and multisensory, of having perpetrated a theft or an assault. The authors wrote that “imagined memory elements regarding what something could have been like can turn into elements of what it would have been like, which can become elements of what it was like.” In the past thirty years, roughly a hundred men and women in the United States have confessed to crimes for which they have later been exonerated by DNA evidence.